Joshua Gang

I joined UC Berkeley's English department in July 2015. My research interests include: 20th- and 21st-century British literature; literature and philosophy of mind, linguistics, and cognitive science; literary history; and the history of criticism.

I'm currently working on my book "Word and Mind: Behaviorism and Literary Modernity, 1913-present," which shows how behaviorism fundamentally changed the way twentieth-century writers thought about the relationship between mind and text. Are literary works externalizations of thought, these writers asked, or can we talk about literature without worrying about self-knowledge, dualism, or the problem of other minds? Examining works by I.A. Richards, the New Critics, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and J.M. Coetzee, "Word and Mind" argues that modernism was not so much a psychological turn inward but rather a new set of formal and critical strategies to contend with empirical problems of mind.